Category Archives: Arts & Crafts

Yea, it’s been spring for a while now, but for once it actually feels like it! Spring has a lot of holidays, a few of which were this past Saturday. First off, there was Earth Day on April 22. We went around our neighborhood picking up trash and recyclables. It didn’t look like much improvement at first, but we had two big bags when we were finished.

Next, to celebrate Record Store Day (also on April 22), we drove out to a small record store to try to find a few albums, but to no prevail. It was fun to get to sort through all the records, though, and see what all was there. Half Price Books also had some records, so we went there in search of both records and books. My dad got his records, I had fun looking for horror books, including Cujo, Frankenstein, Dracula, and a couple of Ray Bradbury books.

Tie-Dye Day was also on April 22, but we weren’t in the mood to do shirts. Instead, we celebrated by making coffee filter flowers. We used water color paint to color the flowers to look like tie-dye, let them dry, then bunched them up to look like flowers and secured them with pipe cleaners. The flowers look very cool on our mini-tree.

1a) Paint the filter with water color and a brush.

1b) Or you can put a bit of water on the filter and dip the filter in water color so it wicks up some paint.

2) Let the filter(s) dry.

3) Fold/crimp/roll your flowers together and secure with pipe cleaner at base. Should look ruffle-y.

Pretty flower tree!

(Had I done this closer to Easter, there would have been an eggs-travagant amount of egg puns while looking back on all the egg-traordinay egg-ventures from the past few years. So I guess it can be looked at as a blessing that you only had to deal with three. ;P )

Pumpkins are one of my favourite things about autumn. There is pumpkin pie, pumpkin spice, jack’o’lantern pumpkins, eyeball pumpkins, twine pumpkins, fake pumpkins, virtual pumpkins, the Pumpkin King, the Great Pumpkin, and the list goes on and on! We like to carve our pumpkin and keep the seeds. I don’t know what our pumpkin will look like this year, but we have been getting more adventurous each year.

Miscellaneous Pumpkins

Skyward Sword: Pumpkin Landing/Lumpy Pumpkin

Twilight Princess: Pumpkin Patch at Ordon

When I say virtual pumpkins, I really mean virtual pumpkins. In Legend of Zelda (LoZ), pumpkins show up in a few games. In Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, both of which I have played, pumpkins contain hearts and rupees (the LoZ currency). In Skyward Sword, there is a pumpkin diner of sorts. In Twilight Princess, there is even Pumpkin Soup in one of the dungeons/temples! You can do a lot with pumpkins in real life, too, but I doubt you’ll find a heart or money in them.

Food Stuff With Pumpkins

I have a recipe of sorts that we use for baking pumpkin seeds. First, make sure that your pumpkin seeds are rinsed/cleaned well and dry. Lay them out on a cookie sheet covered in aluminum foil. Sprinkle brown sugar on them as evenly as possible and as much as you would like. Bake them between 350-400 until they are crispy, but not too terribly crispy. They taste really good when they are done.

We have also madepumpkin funnel cakes and pumpkin cookies. With the pumpkin cookies, we followed the recipe on the link, but we added some maple syrup with the glaze to make a maple-vanilla cream glaze. They were delicious, but now they are gone! In our pumpkin funnel cakes, we didn’t really change anything. They pretty much tasted like normal funnel cakes, but with a little bit more spice than normal ones. They were still good, but I think I’d rather make the cookies again.

Hi guys! I just got done creating a fairy garden with my dad, and it was really fun! I have a how-to video showing just how we made ours. There is a list of what you need in the description. Have fun!

Fairy gardens are actually fairly popular, partially because they are easy to make and also because they look really neat when they are finished. They can also serve as homes for butterflies, hummingbirds, and dragonflies depending on the type you make. There a tons of ideas out there, especially on Pinterest.

I made mine because I am a huge fan of fairies and have been since I was little. We figured it would fill an empty and dull-looking patch of dirt and I had always wanted to make one, so we got to work on our garden.

We finished some more work on my room. We redid the bookcases by painting them black. They stand out better now against the walls.

We also painted some gears above the picture rail molding. We did it in a couple of steps so they look more like they’re in-depth or 3-D. It kind of reminds me of the beginning to Doctor Who, where they have all these gears and clock faces swirling. This Doctor is more steampunk than the other ones–well, it has more steampunk aspects than the others. One is a character called “Missy,” who’s kind of the Doctor’s frenemy. She’s a really long story, but she uses different gadgets that she made by taking other stuff apart (or blowing stuff up to use the parts on the inside). She’s one of my favorite characters in the show.

My school has us do odd projects, called “Inter-Disciplinary Unit” (IDU) projects, but they’re really fun. My most recent project was on Middle Ages fashion (not middle-age fashion). We had the option of drawing outfits, making a doll’s dress, or (drum roll), a life-size costume. I did the full costume so I could have my Halloween costume done early. I only had 10 days and a really busy schedule; my parents called me crazy.

I decided to make a full costume of Maid Marian. Maid Marian was related to King Richard the Lionheart. She probably dressed as a lady while in a castle or around other people, but she dressed more appropriately when she was in the forest with Robin Hood. She would dress in green and sometimes brown in a style like a peasant, but with more style, to blend in with her surroundings. Continue reading →

This Halloween I’m dressing up as a one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater. It’s really cool. (I’m surprised how many people have never heard the song and think I am an eye fairy, butterfly or unicorn.) We used black felt and a white scarf (that I can see through) for an eye. I got the idea to use a noise maker covered in yellow felt as the horn (I wouldn’t go near the hot glue gun, though). We searched lots of places for purple stuff, too; purple shirts, purple pants, purple fur, purple feathers, purple hats, you name it! Let’s just say that after Halloween, I won’t be doing purple for a long time. We also got a foam manikin head to put the hat on when we weren’t using it. Otherwise the horn my mom sewed on would get crushed!

I think that my purple people eater costume tops last year’s costume. Which do you prefer? My headless chicken costume or my purple cyclops?

Last week, we had our school spelling bee. I can’t believe how many different words there are! It’s really hard to remember all of them. Sure, there are all sorts of memory techniques, but one way to remember is to create an image of the word in your mind. For example, when I hear “herbivore,” I think of a plant, which makes me think of an herb. To remember the second “c” in crescent, my mom reminded me that that’s the shape of a crescent moon.

Artsy Words and Letters

Besides using images to help remember how to spell a word, you can use words for art. What I mean by “artsy words and letters” is basically writing a word or letter and incorporating an image/design into it, such as an animal or a plant, or the other way around: taking a scene and hiding words in it.

Artsy Letters

In art class at school, we’re working on illuminated letters, which are basically letters decorated with drawings, painting and other stuff. Illuminated letters originated in Europe during the Middle Ages.

I picked the letter “L” and drew it with a snake wrapped around it, a flower in the 90 degree angle part, and a crescent moon in the upper right corner. Plus…….. a HUGE eye, right-smack-dab in the middle of the drawing. That’s my example of an “artsy letter.” At home, I did an “artsy” K in aluminum foil.

Artsy Words

If there are “artsy letters,” there must be “artsy words,” right? What I mean by that is creating letters with drawings and putting those letters into words.

When I visited New Orleans, LA, we went to this little marketplace-like area. We met this man that was doing peoples’ names as art. It was sooooo cool! We asked him if he could do my name, and 10-15 minutes later, he had finished his beautiful artwork. He made my name full of rainbows, water, butterflies, a palm tree, and part of one letter was even a guitar! It was like he new everything I liked. Anyway, that’s an “artsy word” in my opinion.

Autumn can be a lot of fun. One of my favorite things is raking up a huge pile of leaves and jumping into it. Yes, after a while it gets old, but it’s still a lot of fun. There are other things to do, too, especially with the leaves!

Some leaf projects are:

Making leaf bowls! They are so cool. You just can’t be to hard on them or wash them. But they are cool decorations.

Leaf rubbings! Cool and fun pieces, all you need is some materials you should have around the house (and outside). Really easy for little kids.

Leaf prints! Fun to do, especially if you like to make art with paint.
Here are some leaf prints my mom and I made when I was littler:

I also enjoy looking the at the colors of the leaves when their still on the tree. Some family road-trip stuff is: